Market Management of Peer-to-peer Services (MMAPPS)

Introduction

MMAPPS was a European Union (EU) project in the Vth Framework of the IST-Program. It was funded for the Swiss partner ETH Zürich, TIK by the Bundesamt für Bildung und Wissenschaft (BBW) in Bern, Switzerland. The official project identifications are IST-2001-34201 for the EU and 01.0460 for the BBW.

Official Project Pages

Project Overview

In the modern Internet world, combining mobile and high-bandwidth access, there are multiple possible services, participant roles, different classes of quality of service, and demanding (often distributed) resource requirements. Emerging new peer-to-peer (p2p) networks offer potential solutions but there are currently three basic problems for which there is no solution:

Incentives need to be given to users to get them to provide their resources to p2p services;

Economically efficient resource allocation needs to be achieved in the absence of a central management system;

Scalable p2p communication mechanisms need to be in place covering all aspects of service provisioning and inter-operation.

The project developed and trialed an integrated solution to these problems that allows p2p service creators and host, storage and transport providers to increase the benefit generated by the service.

Objectives

The MMAPPS project (Market Management of Peer-to-peer Services) designed, built and tested a software system to provide management support for p2p services. It carried out user studies to determine socio-economic incentives for end-users to participate in p2p networks. Target users are p2p service creators and host, storage and transport providers. Our system enables target users to explore new charging options and business models for such services.

Work-packges of MMAPPS and Some Details on ETH Zürich's Contribution

MMAPPS consisted of the following seven work-packages:

WP1: Requirements

WP2: Architecture

WP3: Modelling

WP4: Engineering

WP5: Integration and Trials

WP6: Project Management

WP7: Dissemination, Exploitation, Assessment and Evaluation

ETH Zürich was mainly involved in WP2 and WP4, however, contributions to WP3, WP5, and WP7 were made as well. Therefore, the major focus of this description is on the architecture and the engineering.

The main goal of WP2 was to provide a new generic architecture for p2p networks. It had to be generic in such a way that it allows these networks to support different services while still using the same architecture. Such services could include network services like QoS transmissions, computation services like grids, content services like audio file sharing or any combination of them. The architecture especially had to include ways to manage such p2p networks. Creating p2p networks should not be limited to providing one special kind of service but allow easy deployment and offer of new services while using the same way of managing them. This management had to support different kinds of business models to fulfil the objective of creating market managed p2p networks. In order to achieve this goal a special focus lied on the creation of new services by merging existing services parts. Since these parts are distributed over the entire network, it was necessary to offer special functionality for combining them. It was very important that the architecture was scalable and secure and that it supported the accounting of and payment for such services. The outcome of the architecture work package, therefore, consists of a description of architecture components and their functionality. The ways these different components communicate with each other had to be identified. It was necessary to define the data these components exchange and when and how they do it.

The main goal of WP4 was to design and implement a set of prototype modules to enable market-managed p2p services. Existing p2p services and applications as well as innovative service offerings were investigated. The latter were developed throughout the project and draw on the work on requirements, architecture and modelling for viable p2p services, and demonstrate how the market mechanisms enable new forms of p2p service. The engineering work was structured into the middleware itself, the services which use the middleware, and development of adaptation between the two. Besides this structure, there was also a categorisation of p2p service types that could be used to structure the work. As discussed earlier, there were a host of problems and challenges for p2p services, which emerged in each part of the system. For each problem area, it was unknown whether there can be a single solution placed at a specific place or to which extent duplication of functionality had to be accepted. Since there was a natural tension between a set of heterogeneous services and a generic middleware, it was also be a core work item for this work package to exercise and determine the location of functional components in different parts of the system in practice through prototype development. Thereby, this work package verified, validated, and contributed to modify the results of especially the requirements and architecture work packages.

Current Status

The project started formally on April 1, 2002 and ended on September 30, 2004.

Short Summary

The project produced a software system for management of p2p services. Using the solution developed technical and user trials were conducted to achieve the following outcomes:

Give users the incentives to contribute their resources to the service;

Provide for economically efficient allocation of resources sold by third parties in the distributed p2p system where bottlenecks can occur;

Design a technical concept for sessions and services that goes beyond the traditional client-server concepts and a methodology for mapping this description onto a business model and vice versa;

Design and develop open integrated service management middleware for computation, for data and for mobile and wireless network services that integrates technology of p2p services with business models;

Resolve the tension between the need to identify oneself to peers in order to build trust, and possible desires for anonymity. Identification is needed both to ensure peers remember who has helped them, and to enable sanctions against defaulters;

Provide security and integrity solutions.

Our solution to the p2p problem was applied to those p2p services that are dominated by computation, by data and by network services.

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